Let's Talk About Sex - African Erotic Extravaganza
The stereotype of "sexual animal" has plagued the African since
the first European explorers brought home news of an over
sexualized race with inexplicable erotic inclinations and
passions. To this day, there are many people including some
Africans themselves who believe that what has been singled out
as a distinct "African sexuality" is nature's strongest proof of
their racial inferiority and HIV/AIDS is God's punishment and
judgment on an excessively permissive sexual culture. The mere
mention of African sexuality conjures in most people the common
notions of wild, animal, primitive, savage, ecstatic, excessive,
out of control, dangerous on one hand and exotic, sex goddess,
love machine, spontaneous, "in the moment" on the other etc.
This contradictory image of the African (and of Africa for that
matter) - that of a degenerate entity on the one hand, and of a
source of regeneration on the other - occupies in the Western
subconscious a sort of "delicious fright" and engages most
people in the approach-avoidance-approach dance.
Even now as the West turns to indigenous sacred traditions,
wisdom and values as a potential fountain of nourishment to
parched souls of the post-religious West, many Africans are
still ashamed of this aspect of their heritage. What was once an
open and guilt-free expression of sensuality and sexuality is
now a culture off stone-like silence (taboo) around issues of
sex and sexual intercourse especially among the "educated" and
those who want to be seen as "westernized." A silence which both
Western and African scholars, researchers, politicians and the
international aid community have condemned for perpetuating the
spread of HIV/AIDS but which silences few are willing to further
explore to find out what the "noises" filling those silences are
saying, and to provide a platform for more appropriate
responses.
Studies of African sexuality mostly carried out by Westerners
and taken out of the social context in which they are naturally
embedded have tended to rely on particular problematics imbued
with assumptions about African culture. These studies tend to
focus on the "oddness of the other" held up against a Western
model. They focus on HIV/AIDS, the horrors of female
circumcision, the traumas of armed violence and rape, sex work
and trafficking. The African woman especially has been
criticized by the "feminist movement" for wanting sex.
Apparently because she thinks she can willingly engage in sex
she is participating in her own oppression. African women who
are willing to have sex and refuse to embrace the "Western " way
of granting or withholding the treat of sex as a means of
training men to give them what they want are weak minded fools
who have internalized their own oppression because they're
unable to know any better and patriarchy controls their every
move.
Western research on African sexuality has paid far too limited
attention to the African's point of view completely denying and
negating it, and insisting that Africans not only accede to, but
adopt, the Western point of view. The interpretation of the
sensory experience, sexual perceptions and practices is based
entirely on the perceptions of Western reality. Cultural
stereotyping of Africans, especially African women demands that
they dissociate themselves from any enjoyment of their own
sexuality lest men "stop buying cows, because they could get the
milk for free." This deeply entrenched subjective view of
African sexuality fails to recognize the positive aspects of
African culture and how these specific aspects have uniquely
enriched the lives of African people - and in many ways may well
provide the much needed spin to our North American shame-based,
guilt-ridden, body despising,